If I had been a Belgian the last thing I should want my wife and my baby to see would be the ancient university town, the national cradle of the Church, in its present state.

Nevertheless there were many excursionists in Louvain that day.
The Germans had taken down the bars and sight-seers came by autobusses from as far away as Aix-la-Chapelle and from Liege and many from Brussels.

They bought postal cards and climbed about over the mountain ranges of waste, and they mined in the debris mounds for souvenirs.
Altogether, I suppose some of them regarded it as a kind of picnic.
Personally I should rather go to a morgue for a picnic than to Louvain as it looks to-day.

I tried hard, both in Germany among the German soldiers and in Belgium among the Belgians, to get at the truth about Louvain.

The Germans said the outbreak was planned, and that firing broke out at a given signal in various quarters of the town; that, from windows and basements and roofs, bullets rained on them; and that the fighting continued until they had smoked the last of the inhabitants from their houses with fire and put them to death as they fled.